But the obvious solution in this case is to have the child go through the scanners again. Why the pat down? Either the scanners are good enough to detect anything that could have been passed from an unscreened passenger to a screened passenger, or they're not. Unless they are implicitly acknowledging that latter...
Except the security isn't the real deal... it's the Pavlovian response of "Yes, I will comply" they're looking for. They must escalate any situation where it appears a traveller--any traveller, even a frightened child--isn't in total subservience and compliance to the rules. Seperating the child is about inducing terror, and specifically conditioning that child to ALWAYS conform to authority. It isn't a coincidence that there are so many incidents with young kids that the TSA is involved in--the youngest generation is being conditioned to expect invasions of their private bodies rather than resist them, as our generation does. They want to turn these invasive "screenings" into part of the background noise of American life so they can ease similar invasive "screenings" into other parts of our lives. Why?
TSA finds far more cash and drugs than they do guns and bombs--and that's what they're really looking for. Cash they can seize (the booty funds "overhead," leaving more money from taxpayers to spend on boondoggle body scanner devices) is the name of the game. Some police agencies get vast swath of their funding from such seizure activities.
Under an open-source license and be sure to include disclaimers about providing no warranty as to its functionality and suitability for what they're trying to do with it. Best choice would be to consult with a good lawyer who has worked with a "free" distribution of software before. Only in America would you need a lawyer to give something away safely, but here we are.
Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
How about we make this into a law that actually keeps desirable jobs in the country? For example, why only call-center jobs? Those jobs suck and don't pay shit, anyway. How about we say "If more than 5% of your total workforce is outsourced outside the U.S., no government contracts."
If you want to save mega-bucks on salaries by hiring foreigners for 10center per hour? More power to you: But you won't be lining your pockets with tax-money anymore, either.
What everyone fails to consider is the feds can just take the data they want whether you legally give it to them or not. The feds have all the technological and physical means to take any information from any ISP or entity.
Of course, they can only get that data via an ISP if it is transmitted across the Internet in the first place, and while they probably have the resources to pay somebody to break into just about anything, that's still a fruitless exercise if the lending records are anonymized the moment the books get returned. Likely their network admins have considered the "backup hole" and have already dealt with it, since IT people at libraries have librarians for bosses who understand the issues in play, even if some IT folks don't.
Nicholas Merrill ran a New York based ISP and got tired of federal 'information requests'....maximum technical and legal resistance to information requests.
He's tired of fighting The Man, so he's going to set up a new ISP which will let him fight The Man even more? That doesn't even begin to approach making sense. Is this like Fight Club or something?
Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.
Another possibility, however, is if he gets anywhere close to a working model where this is possible that he suddenly has an "accident," or his data-center suffers a "mysterious fire." Or maybe the CIA kills his network engineers the way Israel kills mechanical engineers they think can build high-speed centrifuges in Iran.
Security researchers and customers have been questioning why Apple hasn't yet provided a fix for the malware even though Flashback has been around in one form or another for more than six months now.
Duh... They haven't fixed it yet because Macs don't get viruses, worms, and malware, that's a Windows problem... Hadn't you heard?
It was potentially illegal because Congress was not offically in recess. Republicans have gone out of the way to keep congress out of recess for the the last 3 years using procedural stunts.
What's interesting about that is that, although the Senate was engaging in a charade of a "session," Obama didn't actually have to wait for them to "adjourn." Article 3 gives the executive the power to declare congress in recess in situations where the houses are divided regarding going into recess--as they were at the time.
Why didn't he use it? It's spelled out in the constitution--not even an amendment, it's part of the original text--so what gives? Why not just issue an executive order that says "Pursuant to Article 3 powers of the executive, with both houses of congress in disagreement over whether to adjourn, I hereby declare them to be in recess until xyz date."
It wouldn't have been any kind of power-grab... It is the most constitutional thing he could have done, and would have been absolutely air-tight. He'd have out-manuevered the GOP, gotten his nominees appointed, and been able to move on. Instead, he gave his political enemies more ammunition to attack him with. Surely he has to have figured out they're going to be pissed and sue, no matter what he does, and that the Supreme Court fix is in, so he's got to conduct himself in a manner that is just absolutely constitutionally unquestionably allowed.
Filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them.
yes, that's it!
And also, before I forget: the corollary of "filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them" is that "when smart people program those filters, they're very effective."
We've been suing spammers for 14 years, and have made at best a tiny dent in the problem. Once we got to advanced filtering that actually worked pretty well? At that point, having an effectively run filter became very... well, effective, for lack of a better label.
You do the math... I mean, you won't, since you've obviously already staked out a position that, no matter how ineffective or illogical it is shown to be, you will defend until you get bored. But everybody who isn't you, feel free to do the math and recognize the bullshit: Just suing spammers doesn't do a fucking thing. If it did, the "CAN-SPAM Act" would've solved all of our problems, all by itself, almost overnight.
It didn't.
What made email usable? SPAM filtering in combination with suing the biggest spammers into bankruptcy. Slowly but surely, email got better and better.
Hundreds, thousands of accounts, using proxies/botnet.
(or less than 10% different) URL
short URLs
Filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them.
yes, that's it!
...Except that Twitter can see all of the posts simultaneously, even though you can't, so posting from multiple accounts isn't an automatically effective dodge.
You could also make the threshold 3-5% or any arbitrary number...
I notice you have no response to the real thrust of my post, which is, neither solution by itself solves anything.
Filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them.
For spam on twitter to get results, it would seem to require meeting a couple criteria:
1) Unless the person you want to spam is following you, it has to be directed @somebody so it will show up in their mentions, or the target of the tweet will never actually see it. 2) An actionable link for the user to click-on once they see the tweet.
So, there are literally billions of messages sent on Twitter every day. An enormous percentage of them do not include an "@", which means you can almost certainly discount that tweet as spam. So the "sameness" thing really comes down to the URL... So how hard would it be to write a rule that says:
"If person XYZ posts more than XYZ tweets @somebody in XYZ period of time and all of the tweets lead to the exact-same (or less than 10% different) URL, its likely spam."
Answer: It wouldn't be that hard at all. And is 100% necessary, as the decade-plus-long failure of various "sue spammers" campaigns can attest to.
Yes, by all means sue the bastards. But don't expect the judge to solve the whole problem in perpetuity throughout the universe--instead use the judge to extract a penalty from the spammers after the fact.
In other words, it isn't "either/or" but "both" that you require for an effective solution.
Hey, how many "lets sue all the spammers into bankruptcy" campaigns have there been? When will those lawsuits lead to an end to spam? The first one I recall was in 1998..,
As of today, let's call it 14 years and counting suing spammers, and yet a cursory look at my spam folder (in any of my email accounts--even the unpublished/never-given-out-to-anybody-used-for-personal-archival-purposes one) shows it to be STUFFED with junk mail.
I'm not arguing against suing, merely pointing out that suing the toolmakers that they know about won't by itself stop spammers.
For example, what about a lawsuit stops them from quietly developing twitter spam tools and spreading them around the Internet on various not-obvious-who-owns-them servers, and then regularly moving their toolkits from place to place to make IP banning ineffective? Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Likely, the "best" spammers were on this route long before Twitter started suing people, which means we're still going to need filtering, with or without lawsuits.
Also, just because the attacker might shift tactics doesn't mean you shouldn't try to defeat his current tactic... Plus, you could write the rules intelligently so that just a cursory alteration of the non-URL portion of the tweet wouldn't let the message pass as "spam." For example, it's really hard to imagine that 10,000 tweets to some random landing page on bit.ly coming in over the course of a few seconds from the same account is anything but spam. If you really wanted to get fancy, you could include a circuit-breaker such as "Can't tweet the same link @ more people than you have Twitter followers in xyz period of time."
We attempting to contact the CEO at the head office for comment, but discovered that company HQ was located in a small post office box in the Cayman Islands.
...a post-box that is currently filled with unread magazines, unpaid utility bills, and angry letters from disappointed shareholders, which might explain why notes to the CEO are also going unanswered...
You're not the only one confused by this quirk of UK tax-law... At a fundamental level, EVERY business is really just an "order fulfillment" business. If you can just apply that label and not pay taxes, what stops every company from organizing a Luxembourg shell-company to "own" the business, then self-applying the same label and never paying another nickel in corporate income tax?
Even though the cynic in me knows better, I desperately hope the answer isn't "nothing whatsoever."
Mod this up! Identical messages to hundreds (or thousands) of people in a few seconds are SPAM, and almost certainly violate the TOS. Seems like the technical challenge to blocking that sort of spam would be quite low.
Granted, it is hard to tell just what is "spam" on Twitter since, to those of us who aren't regular users of the site, almost all of it looks like unredeemable garbage. But I assume regular tweeters know the difference between what they "want to see" and what they don't.
The only damage done was that the public got to know about them.
This is the angle that so few people in our country seem to get... Nothing that Manning released was really all that "critical" to fighting a war. It was critical, however, in exposing the government's bottomless bucket of lies on the subject. So, obviously, Manning must die.
Yeah, he probably should have specified the unspoken ellipses there--i.e....
"We want Federal agencies to begin sharing as much data as they can. ...With each other... "
In all fairness, SECDEF probably assumed the people he was talking to were competent enough to fill in the blanks (you know, the part about not revealing the data to the Chinese mafia, for example.) Obviously, that assumption was a mistake.
Having said that, apparently the owner of the boat no longer wants it back, so the question of ownership is up in the air.
I believe you just laid out the rules of ownership. The owner still owns it. Whoever salvages has a maritime lien, and apparently the owner has already said he won't pay it.
He probably already got an insurance settlement and replaced it, so getting this "lost" boat back could create a PITA situation for himself... and really, who knows what shape its in after drifting across the Pacific... It's been adrift for a year. I understand why he doesn't want it back.
One slightly used Fishing Trawler. Low hours, 2x Marine Diesels that ran like a dream when last started. There has been some maintenance deferred last season, but otherwise perfect. All controls Japanese.
Slashdot Mirror
I weep with joy... Bugs Bunny cracks me the fuck up. Thank you, sir.
But the obvious solution in this case is to have the child go through the scanners again. Why the pat down? Either the scanners are good enough to detect anything that could have been passed from an unscreened passenger to a screened passenger, or they're not. Unless they are implicitly acknowledging that latter...
Except the security isn't the real deal... it's the Pavlovian response of "Yes, I will comply" they're looking for. They must escalate any situation where it appears a traveller--any traveller, even a frightened child--isn't in total subservience and compliance to the rules. Seperating the child is about inducing terror, and specifically conditioning that child to ALWAYS conform to authority. It isn't a coincidence that there are so many incidents with young kids that the TSA is involved in--the youngest generation is being conditioned to expect invasions of their private bodies rather than resist them, as our generation does. They want to turn these invasive "screenings" into part of the background noise of American life so they can ease similar invasive "screenings" into other parts of our lives. Why?
TSA finds far more cash and drugs than they do guns and bombs--and that's what they're really looking for. Cash they can seize (the booty funds "overhead," leaving more money from taxpayers to spend on boondoggle body scanner devices) is the name of the game. Some police agencies get vast swath of their funding from such seizure activities.
Under an open-source license and be sure to include disclaimers about providing no warranty as to its functionality and suitability for what they're trying to do with it. Best choice would be to consult with a good lawyer who has worked with a "free" distribution of software before. Only in America would you need a lawyer to give something away safely, but here we are.
How about we make this into a law that actually keeps desirable jobs in the country? For example, why only call-center jobs? Those jobs suck and don't pay shit, anyway. How about we say "If more than 5% of your total workforce is outsourced outside the U.S., no government contracts."
If you want to save mega-bucks on salaries by hiring foreigners for 10center per hour? More power to you: But you won't be lining your pockets with tax-money anymore, either.
What everyone fails to consider is the feds can just take the data they want whether you legally give it to them or not. The feds have all the technological and physical means to take any information from any ISP or entity.
Of course, they can only get that data via an ISP if it is transmitted across the Internet in the first place, and while they probably have the resources to pay somebody to break into just about anything, that's still a fruitless exercise if the lending records are anonymized the moment the books get returned. Likely their network admins have considered the "backup hole" and have already dealt with it, since IT people at libraries have librarians for bosses who understand the issues in play, even if some IT folks don't.
Does your computer just not have "Google" or something? Get off your ass, Mr. Skeptic. My local library is doing this too: I asked.
He's tired of fighting The Man, so he's going to set up a new ISP which will let him fight The Man even more? That doesn't even begin to approach making sense. Is this like Fight Club or something?
Its actually quite ingenious... He's going to create an ISP where it is much-more-difficult to compromise a users privacy. They're designing it from the ground up to be PATRIOT-Act proof because it will literally be impossible for them to give the feds the data they want. It is fewer fights, but may amount to one HUGE fight with the biggest gorilla on earth, the U.S. Justice Department.
Another possibility, however, is if he gets anywhere close to a working model where this is possible that he suddenly has an "accident," or his data-center suffers a "mysterious fire." Or maybe the CIA kills his network engineers the way Israel kills mechanical engineers they think can build high-speed centrifuges in Iran.
Duh... They haven't fixed it yet because Macs don't get viruses, worms, and malware, that's a Windows problem... Hadn't you heard?
Article 2, Section 3, Clause 2.
Oops! Thanks! Knew there was a 3 in there somewhere...
It was potentially illegal because Congress was not offically in recess. Republicans have gone out of the way to keep congress out of recess for the the last 3 years using procedural stunts.
What's interesting about that is that, although the Senate was engaging in a charade of a "session," Obama didn't actually have to wait for them to "adjourn." Article 3 gives the executive the power to declare congress in recess in situations where the houses are divided regarding going into recess--as they were at the time.
Why didn't he use it? It's spelled out in the constitution--not even an amendment, it's part of the original text--so what gives? Why not just issue an executive order that says "Pursuant to Article 3 powers of the executive, with both houses of congress in disagreement over whether to adjourn, I hereby declare them to be in recess until xyz date."
It wouldn't have been any kind of power-grab... It is the most constitutional thing he could have done, and would have been absolutely air-tight. He'd have out-manuevered the GOP, gotten his nominees appointed, and been able to move on. Instead, he gave his political enemies more ammunition to attack him with. Surely he has to have figured out they're going to be pissed and sue, no matter what he does, and that the Supreme Court fix is in, so he's got to conduct himself in a manner that is just absolutely constitutionally unquestionably allowed.
"Proud to be an American..."
Been a while for me, too. I mean, I'm not tearing-up or anything, but it's something.
Request permission for flyby...
Riiiiight... There is no cake!
Fucking matrix again...
yes, that's it!
And also, before I forget: the corollary of "filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them" is that "when smart people program those filters, they're very effective."
We've been suing spammers for 14 years, and have made at best a tiny dent in the problem. Once we got to advanced filtering that actually worked pretty well? At that point, having an effectively run filter became very... well, effective, for lack of a better label.
You do the math... I mean, you won't, since you've obviously already staked out a position that, no matter how ineffective or illogical it is shown to be, you will defend until you get bored. But everybody who isn't you, feel free to do the math and recognize the bullshit: Just suing spammers doesn't do a fucking thing. If it did, the "CAN-SPAM Act" would've solved all of our problems, all by itself, almost overnight.
It didn't.
What made email usable? SPAM filtering in combination with suing the biggest spammers into bankruptcy. Slowly but surely, email got better and better.
Hundreds, thousands of accounts, using proxies/botnet.
short URLs
yes, that's it!
...Except that Twitter can see all of the posts simultaneously, even though you can't, so posting from multiple accounts isn't an automatically effective dodge.
You could also make the threshold 3-5% or any arbitrary number...
I notice you have no response to the real thrust of my post, which is, neither solution by itself solves anything.
Filters are only as unintelligent as the people who program them.
For spam on twitter to get results, it would seem to require meeting a couple criteria:
1) Unless the person you want to spam is following you, it has to be directed @somebody so it will show up in their mentions, or the target of the tweet will never actually see it.
2) An actionable link for the user to click-on once they see the tweet.
So, there are literally billions of messages sent on Twitter every day. An enormous percentage of them do not include an "@", which means you can almost certainly discount that tweet as spam. So the "sameness" thing really comes down to the URL... So how hard would it be to write a rule that says:
"If person XYZ posts more than XYZ tweets @somebody in XYZ period of time and all of the tweets lead to the exact-same (or less than 10% different) URL, its likely spam."
Answer: It wouldn't be that hard at all. And is 100% necessary, as the decade-plus-long failure of various "sue spammers" campaigns can attest to.
Yes, by all means sue the bastards. But don't expect the judge to solve the whole problem in perpetuity throughout the universe--instead use the judge to extract a penalty from the spammers after the fact.
In other words, it isn't "either/or" but "both" that you require for an effective solution.
Hey, how many "lets sue all the spammers into bankruptcy" campaigns have there been? When will those lawsuits lead to an end to spam? The first one I recall was in 1998..,
As of today, let's call it 14 years and counting suing spammers, and yet a cursory look at my spam folder (in any of my email accounts--even the unpublished/never-given-out-to-anybody-used-for-personal-archival-purposes one) shows it to be STUFFED with junk mail.
I'm not arguing against suing, merely pointing out that suing the toolmakers that they know about won't by itself stop spammers.
For example, what about a lawsuit stops them from quietly developing twitter spam tools and spreading them around the Internet on various not-obvious-who-owns-them servers, and then regularly moving their toolkits from place to place to make IP banning ineffective? Absolutely nothing whatsoever. Likely, the "best" spammers were on this route long before Twitter started suing people, which means we're still going to need filtering, with or without lawsuits.
Also, just because the attacker might shift tactics doesn't mean you shouldn't try to defeat his current tactic... Plus, you could write the rules intelligently so that just a cursory alteration of the non-URL portion of the tweet wouldn't let the message pass as "spam." For example, it's really hard to imagine that 10,000 tweets to some random landing page on bit.ly coming in over the course of a few seconds from the same account is anything but spam. If you really wanted to get fancy, you could include a circuit-breaker such as "Can't tweet the same link @ more people than you have Twitter followers in xyz period of time."
We attempting to contact the CEO at the head office for comment, but discovered that company HQ was located in a small post office box in the Cayman Islands.
...a post-box that is currently filled with unread magazines, unpaid utility bills, and angry letters from disappointed shareholders, which might explain why notes to the CEO are also going unanswered...
You're not the only one confused by this quirk of UK tax-law... At a fundamental level, EVERY business is really just an "order fulfillment" business. If you can just apply that label and not pay taxes, what stops every company from organizing a Luxembourg shell-company to "own" the business, then self-applying the same label and never paying another nickel in corporate income tax?
Even though the cynic in me knows better, I desperately hope the answer isn't "nothing whatsoever."
Mod this up! Identical messages to hundreds (or thousands) of people in a few seconds are SPAM, and almost certainly violate the TOS. Seems like the technical challenge to blocking that sort of spam would be quite low.
Granted, it is hard to tell just what is "spam" on Twitter since, to those of us who aren't regular users of the site, almost all of it looks like unredeemable garbage. But I assume regular tweeters know the difference between what they "want to see" and what they don't.
The only damage done was that the public got to know about them.
This is the angle that so few people in our country seem to get... Nothing that Manning released was really all that "critical" to fighting a war. It was critical, however, in exposing the government's bottomless bucket of lies on the subject. So, obviously, Manning must die.
Yeah, he probably should have specified the unspoken ellipses there--i.e. ...
"We want Federal agencies to begin sharing as much data as they can. ...With each other... "
In all fairness, SECDEF probably assumed the people he was talking to were competent enough to fill in the blanks (you know, the part about not revealing the data to the Chinese mafia, for example.) Obviously, that assumption was a mistake.
Having said that, apparently the owner of the boat no longer wants it back, so the question of ownership is up in the air.
I believe you just laid out the rules of ownership. The owner still owns it. Whoever salvages has a maritime lien, and apparently the owner has already said he won't pay it.
He probably already got an insurance settlement and replaced it, so getting this "lost" boat back could create a PITA situation for himself... and really, who knows what shape its in after drifting across the Pacific... It's been adrift for a year. I understand why he doesn't want it back.
FOR SALE
One slightly used Fishing Trawler. Low hours, 2x Marine Diesels that ran like a dream when last started.
There has been some maintenance deferred last season, but otherwise perfect.
All controls Japanese.
$3,000,000 obo.
...as they are slashdotted into next Tuesday.